A new book offers a detailed history of human-animal relationships and how we got to where we are now.

Our pets have increasingly become family members but we often ignore the suffering of other species.

We’re responsible for the unseen consequences of our actions, not just the seen ones.

I've long been interested in the many ways in which nonhuman animals (animals) have been viewed during different periods of history. A few years ago I published an post titled Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement—Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA, was called "a traitor to his species" because of his views on the moral status of animals—but other commitments sitting on my desk got in my way of doing more research.

Because of my lingering interests in human-animal relationships and how these interactions have evolved over time, I was thrilled to learn of an outstanding book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, by Bill Wasik, who was recently named the new Science editor of the New York Times, and veterinarian Monica Murphy. In their deeply researched and fascinating historical account of the moral transition of human attitudes toward animals, they cover the contributions of many people, including Bergh.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Our Kindred Creatures?

Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy: Over the course of researching and writing our previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, we discovered that many of the attitudes towards animals which Americans currently take for granted formed during the late nineteenth century. Our abhorrence of cruelty and bloodsport, our fascination with animals in entertainment, our limited acknowledgement of what livestock go through, our concern about extinction of wildlife........

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